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“I actually love this state. This feels good being back in Michigan … I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drove a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.”

Anything wrong with anyone owning two Cadillacs? Nope. If you have the money, why not?

The problem, of course, is in Romney actually speaking those words out loud at a time when unemployment is at 8 percent, middle class America has been devastated by an economic recession and millions are suffering…and at at time when Romney desperately needs to lose his well-deserved image as poster boy for the 1 percent.

Mitt Romney might be a successful businessman but he’s still an idiot. Love the picture below of Romney speaking to a crowd of 1200 at Ford Field Stadium in Michigan. Beautiful because nothing inspires confidence like a man speaking to 65,000 empty seats. Did I mention he’s an idiot?

They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,” while the less adventurous say that he’s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.

Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.

Please forgive this outburst. It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies. A significant part of his opposition still cannot accept that Obama is a rather moderate politician quite conventional in his tastes and his interests. And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obama’s adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.

True, some of this is driven by cable television (a venue in which I acknowledge regularly participating). Attacks designed to gin up the conservative base are quickly recycled to gin up outrage within Obama’s own base. Moreover, Obama is not the first president caught up in the rank unpleasantness of this particularly unforgiving political moment. A quick Google search will unearth references to George W. Bush as a “Nazi,” and Bill Clinton’s Republican opponents went so far as to impeach him in a shameful episode of extreme partisanship.

On those Hitler metaphors: Can we please agree to a voluntary cross-party ban on invoking the Fuhrer in the context of American politics? Only dictators who commit genocide against millions qualify for this odious comparison. It trivializes Hitler’s crimes to use Nazi references as everyday epithets.

During his live comedy performance on Yahoo on Thursday evening, comedian Bill Maher shocked audiences around the world when he announced he’d be donating $1 million to Priorities USA Action — a pro-Obama Super PAC.

Priorities USA Action bills itself as an “organization dedicated to mobilizing Americans to preserve, protect and promote the middle class, and to ensure opportunity and freedom for the next generation.”